by Steve Mosby
Family had turned out to be a similar dead end. Blythe had grown up in Moorton, a small village a couple of hundred miles north, close to the mountains. A single child to a single mother, who seemed to have been unable to care for him, he had bounced around a succession of more distant family members in that area. He had been a poor student, but as a teenager had never been in any kind of serious trouble with the police. No convictions on record. Almost unbelievably, his sheet was entirely clean.
‘No word from Moorton PD yet on friends in that area?’ Emma said.
‘No.’ I opened the file they’d sent, scanned down. ‘We’ve got a list of random unsolved crimes there from way back when. I don’t think they’ve even filtered it. It’s just an info dump. Mostly burglaries.’
‘Oh, how useful.’
‘Tell me about it.’
We’d have to look through unsolved crimes eventually, but it was no help to us right now. What we needed was a name – someone he’d been friends with, or still had some kind of relationship with – and we wouldn’t find that in unsolved crimes that, by their nature, had no names attached to them at all.
We had copies of his financial records, going back the last five years so far. Blythe hadn’t used his debit card since withdrawing that two hundred pounds in cash close to home, which was disappointing. That would at least have given us a direction to start looking in. Searching vaguely for positives, I supposed at least it meant he was cash-limited. I expected him to ditch his vehicle soon, if he hadn’t done so already, and public transport would be impossibly risky for him with his face all over the news. That meant that wherever he was right now, it would be difficult for him to travel very far away from it. All we needed was a confirmed sighting, a single concrete lead, and we could begin to close the net.
Nothing on that level so far.
I had been twiddling a pen as I worked. I put it down now and stared at the plasma screen again. At the victims. Pressure was building in my chest. I still couldn’t keep my thoughts away from the bodies we’d found, and the body we hadn’t.
‘Blythe moved here in 1998,’ I said. ‘A year before the killings began.’
Emma didn’t look up. ‘Yes.’
‘That means he had his base before Rebecca Brown was abducted. He was here from the start to the finish.’
‘Yes.’
‘Meaning there’s no reason we shouldn’t have found all fourteen bodies in the house.’
‘Oh God.’ Emma looked up at me now. ‘Leave it, Will. It’s not our problem. Focus on our problem. Please.’
I was about to argue my case again, but of course she was right. Our problem was finding Blythe. I couldn’t tell her about my problem, which was entirely separate and which I had to keep secret. Even the possibility of being removed from this investigation made that sense of pressure harden in my chest.
I switched windows on my computer and logged into my personal email. There – again – was that message from Rob. Another link to the past. I opened it and reread it.
Will, you must have seen the news. You must know what’s happened.
I think about you all the time.
I’m so sorry we don’t speak any more. Please talk to me.
The emotions rose up inside me – anger; guilt; a profound sadness at how things had changed – and once again I wanted to click on reply. But there was nothing to say after all this time, and no point in even trying. Talking to Ferguson before the briefing yesterday, I’d felt that the distinction between then and now made little sense, but while sometimes that was the case, it wasn’t always true. Time can build bridges, but it can also destroy them. Sometimes the ones you wish you could repair are too distant, too far away. Some things, once left behind, slip very quickly out of reach.
The phone on the desk rang. I picked it up.
‘DI Turner.’
It was the desk sergeant from downstairs. ‘Got someone here to see you,’ he said. ‘A relative.’
The pressure tightened again. Anna’s parents. I was convinced of it. I shut down the email with a single click. If only it was really that easy to push the past out of sight.
‘Who?’
‘Jeremy Townsend. Melanie West’s former husband.’
‘I hope he’s out of earshot for that description.’
‘Don’t worry.’
The desk sergeant’s voice was loud enough that Emma could hear him.
‘Go,’ she told me. ‘If anything, it’ll be helpful for me.’
There was some relief that it wasn’t Anna’s parents who had arrived, but it was short-lived. There was still so little I would be able to tell any of them who came here.
They’ll understand, I thought. It’s too early. Too soon.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Bring Mr Townsend to my office.’
Sixteen
‘Please. Come in.’
The office Emma and I shared was little larger than a cupboard, with barely enough room for a desk and two chairs, and no natural light. I’d at least managed to clear away the piles of paperwork. And I supposed any of the people I ended up talking to in here during the course of this investigation weren’t going to care too much about the decor. They would have far more important things on their minds.
Jeremy Townsend certainly appeared to.
He was tall and thin, and was dressed in a crumpled white shirt, which he’d left untucked from his old black cords. His hair was greying and unkempt, and his beard was scratchy and uncared for. The clothes looked like he’d had them for years and no longer fitted properly: his upper body was bird-thin beneath the shirt, and the trousers looked in danger of falling down. He hesitated in the doorway, glancing around the room nervously, his gaze not meeting mine at first, and then seeming bleary and unfocused when it did. If I hadn’t known why he was here, I might have assumed he was a derelict of some kind.
‘Please.’ I said it more softly this time. ‘Come in.’
Townsend nodded once, then stepped inside and closed the door behind him. I shook his hand over the desk as he approached it.
‘Detective Will Turner,’ I said.
‘Jeremy Townsend.’ His grip was as tentative as the rest of him. ‘My wife was Melanie West.’
Melanie West was the sixth known victim, abducted in 2005, but looking at Townsend now, it might as well have happened yesterday. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen someone look quite so tired; not just in the everyday sense, but something deep inside him: an exhaustion of the soul, perhaps. But it was stupid to judge. Even if he had moved on in the intervening years – buried all the sadness and grief – the news from yesterday would have disturbed the soil, turning it over and bringing all those terrible memories back to life again.
‘Thank you for seeing me,’ he said quietly.
‘Not at all.’ I gestured to the other side of the desk. ‘Please. Have a seat. And can I get you a drink? Coffee? Tea?’
Townsend shook his head as he sat down.
‘No, I’m fine, thank you. I’m sorry for the way I must look.’
‘You certainly don’t need to apologise.’
He closed his eyes and rubbed at them, and I noticed the wedding ring on his hand. Even after all this time, he still wore it. It was possible he’d remarried, I supposed, but I suspected he hadn’t. There was something about his manner and his clothes. He looked as if he’d been trapped in the time of his wife’s disappearance and had somehow stepped straight over a decade to see me now.
His hands moved back down to his lap.
‘I don’t really know what to say, now that I’m here. I just knew that I had to come.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You can ask me anything you want. You’ll appreciate there are limits to what I can say right now, but I promise I’ll do my best to tell you what I can.’
‘Thank you. There was so much that I wasn’t told before. Back when it happened.’
I nodded sympathetically, casting my mind back – and yes, of course. It was Melanie West’s abduc
tion that had brought the investigation together. Hers had been the Red River letter that had included the wedding ring, confirming the veracity of the killer’s correspondence. That development had flipped everything on its head. With the police involved distracted and excited, it was sadly very likely indeed that Townsend had ended up feeling sidelined from the investigation.
I also knew that his wife’s wedding ring had been retained as evidence and never returned to him. It would be stored downstairs somewhere. And yet he still wore his own.
‘I’ll try my best to rectify that,’ I said.
‘He hasn’t been caught yet? This man, Blythe?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet. This is confidential information, but we believe the suspect left on holiday, and we don’t as yet know where. I can tell you, though, that this is one of the biggest manhunts we’ve ever launched, and that we’re co-ordinating with several departments around the country to trace him. And we will. We will find him shortly.’
‘He’s still somewhere in the country?’
‘We believe so. And obviously, his details are in the public domain now. It’s impossible for him to lie low forever. We’ll find him, I promise you.’
‘Alive?’
Townsend looked directly at me for only the second time since entering the office, and I was taken aback by the sudden urgency in his voice. The answer was clearly important to him.
‘We hope so,’ I said. ‘I want to make sure this man faces justice for the terrible crimes he’s committed. Obviously there are no guarantees, but we’ll be doing everything possible to take him alive. In an ideal world, he’ll turn himself in. In this one. . .’ I spread my hands.
Townsend stared back at me for a few seconds longer, as though my answer wasn’t sufficient. The look in his eyes was unnerving. Why did it matter to him so much? But after a moment, he looked away and swallowed.
‘I understand you’ve found. . . remains.’
‘Yes.’ There was no point in sugar-coating this; it was all over the news, and in my experience, relatives of victims ultimately preferred that you were straightforward with them. ‘Again, this is completely confidential. It appears that Blythe kept the bodies of his victims in a cellar below his house. They have been there for some years, and so the remains we’ve found are severely decomposed. It’s going to take some time to identify the victims. But we will, I promise.’
‘So you can’t say for certain if you’ve found Melanie?’
‘No. I’m sorry. We can’t say that right now.’
Townsend shook his head and looked down, as though he couldn’t make sense of what I was telling him. Despite the unease at his manner, I felt sympathy for him. With his wife’s abduction linking the cases, he would have been the first survivor who had understood early on what had happened to her, and so he wouldn’t have been able to hold out hope in the way the relatives of earlier victims perhaps could. But of course, he would have done so anyway. That’s what people do. Until we know, we hold out hope. Even if it’s the smallest of possible flames, constantly fluttering, we cup our hands around it and do our best to protect it from the breeze. Yesterday, that hope must have been all but extinguished. And yet, at least in his head, I’d just given him the slightest hint of it back, because I couldn’t tell him for certain.
The situation demanded more.
‘I understand what a distressing development this must be.’ I leaned forward, speaking gently. ‘I can only offer my sincerest sympathies for the loss you’ve suffered, and how this news must affect you. The remains are being carefully handled, I promise you that, and we’ll identify them as soon as we can. I also promise that we will do our best to find this man and bring him to justice on behalf of your wife and all his other victims.’
There was a moment of silence. Townsend’s shoulders were moving slightly. I wondered if he was crying. If so, I would let him do so quietly. But then he looked up at me, and instead of the hope or sadness I’d been expecting, I saw bewilderment and confusion on his face – desperation, even. And there was fear there too, I realised. The tickling unease at the back of my mind intensified. Because I understood on an instinctive level that something about this man wasn’t right.
‘How many?’ he said.
I blinked. It wasn’t surprise at the question so much as the sense of things suddenly clicking into place in my subconscious – the sensation that my unease, even if I couldn’t explain it logically, had been justified in some way I still didn’t understand.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
And again that urgency in his voice as he stared directly at me.
‘How many bodies have you found?’ he said.
‘Which is a strange question to ask, don’t you think?’
It was later on in the afternoon, and I was back in the operations room with Emma: both of us in our secluded corner, working our way through the various reports and interviews that still kept coming in, and which still – so far – had given us nothing to go on. I’d been telling her about my encounter with Jeremy Townsend, focusing on the question he’d asked me.
Engrossed in a report on the other side of the desk, or perhaps just pretending to be, Emma shrugged.
‘Is it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Well I don’t,’ she said. ‘He’s seen the news, so he knows we’ve found remains. You told him yourself you can’t confirm if his wife’s among them. And it’s not like we’ve even publicly confirmed that Blythe is the Red River Killer. Maybe that was just his way of figuring out if the media reports were true.’
‘Maybe.’
I supposed she had a point. Townsend knew we’d found Amanda Cassidy, who was presumed to be the latest victim of the Red River Killer, along with other remains on Blythe’s property. But he didn’t know for certain that Blythe was the man who had taken his wife, and I hadn’t been able to confirm it for him. Perhaps that was what his question had been getting at. We couldn’t identify the remains yet, but did the numbers at least match?
But the unease I’d felt while speaking to him remained. If anything it was stronger than before. It wasn’t just that his question had tied into the discovery at the morgue – that one body did appear to be missing – it was the fact that something about his whole demeanour had struck me as odd and off kilter. He’d seemed nervous and apprehensive from the very beginning, but not in the way I’d expect from a grieving relative.
‘I wish I’d recorded him,’ I said.
‘Yeah, that would have been a great idea. I’m deeply sorry for your loss, now let me read you your rights.’ Emma shook her head. ‘What on earth would you want to do that for?’
‘So that you could have seen what he was like. There was something off about him. It was almost as though he. . .’ I trailed off, thinking.
‘Almost as though he what?’
‘Almost as though he knew something.’
Emma raised an eyebrow. ‘Seriously, Will?’
‘Suspected something, then. I don’t know. Like there was something he wasn’t telling me. Like he was thinking about things from a different angle than he should have been.’
‘Jesus. Maybe you should have dragged him to an interview room. It sounds like you wanted to.’
‘Not quite.’
‘What was his name again?’
‘Jeremy Townsend. I’m so glad you’ve been paying attention to everything I’ve been saying.’
‘I can’t follow your every flight of fancy, Will. I’d never touch the ground.’ She frowned. ‘The name rings a bell, though.’
‘Probably from the case file.’
‘I don’t think so. It’s a big file. No, it’s from somewhere else.’
‘I’m sure it will come back to you.’
She shrugged again, then looked at me more seriously.
‘Don’t mess this up for us, Will? Okay?’
I looked back at her, and reminded myself that the case meant just as much to her as it did to me, if for entirely different r
easons.
‘I won’t,’ I said.
‘Good.’
She turned her attention back to the reports. Which was understandable. Aside from the fact that I was trying her patience severely today, she hadn’t been in the room with Townsend and seen him face to face. And we both knew she was right about the flights of fancy. With this case especially, I had to be careful not to let them overshadow things. I was too invested here; I needed to be involved. There was a real danger that investment could cloud my judgement, and so I had to make sure I didn’t do anything that pushed me – pushed both of us, in fact – out of the room.
It doesn’t have to be you that gets him.
But as I glanced at the far wall for what must have been the hundredth time that day – at Anna’s face, smiling out from the past – and felt the guilt and sadness and the anger inside me, I was no longer sure that was true.
My computer pinged. Emma’s did too – a report coming through electronically, delivered to both of us. I turned to my screen and started to read it, but Emma got there first.
‘We’ve got a sighting of Blythe,’ she said. ‘He’s in Moorton.’
Seventeen
The old Grief House has been abandoned for as long as John Blythe can recall.
It stands more or less in the middle of nowhere, on top of a short embankment by the side of a rarely used country lane. There is a possibility that he explored it as a teenager, but a lot of these old buildings in the wilds between the village and the mountains are the same: hardy stone monoliths from another era, most of them only ever glimpsed in the distance while driving along the isolated roads out here. Any doors and windows are long gone, and the walls and floors within are bare stone. Some parts have collapsed, and the rooms are cluttered with piles of rock and fractured timber, open to the sky above. In other places, trees have burst through the floor to grow inside, their branches stretching out through the holes in the walls, so that they appear to be wearing what remains of the building like a stone suit of armour.
